Actually, in Silicon Valley we often barely know our neighbors, but it wasn’t always that way.

Tinker Dice

Currently, if you go in for the top amount, you will end up with a pound of his dice at some point later this year. Perfect if you are running a massive Dwaven-techno based Tunnels and Trolls campaign. Or you can get them in more reasonable quantities. Plus there are stretch goals that will yield different color and material options for supporters if enough backers kick in.

Because who doesn’t want a set of dice which indicate that you are probably screwed even before you make your saving throw?

I should also mention, for the sake of completeness, that the Tunnels and Trolls mention was because a) there was a kickstarter for an updated rule set from Flying Buffalo earlier this year, so it keeps with the theme and b) Tunnels and Trolls only uses six sided dice, so I was able to play many years ago by raiding our copy of Risk.

@Ben Corroon – It made you sad because that wasn’t enough, because that was too much, or because you needed some excuse to inject a link to another site into my comment thread in an attempt to use it as an advertising medium?

@Ben Corroon – Certainly you should view any Kickstarter with a skeptical eye. I have seen a fair share of them that are clearly over promising.

I certainly wasn’t going to put in any money for the Ouya. On the flip side, I think it is still early to declare it a failure. It is a pretty ambitious project and any real measure of success as a platform will first require early adopters to create things for it to make it interesting to the wider public.

And there have been some projects where an over abundance of success has caused an unexpected burden. Steve Jackson Games got way more money for its O.G.R.E. Designers Edition than they expected, which has delayed the project because team felt they had to give people something for that money rather than just keeping the excess.

Does Mark Jacobs “deserve” that much funding for his game? Well, “deserve” is a loaded word. But he does have a track record, spotty though it may be, and he did declare he was putting his own matching amout of money on the line. So he seems more likely to deliver something close to what he promised (no big software project finishes unscathed) in a reasonable time frame than some random team I have never heard of.

Which brings us back to Tesh and his dice. Do I believe that he can deliver what he promises should he fund? Absolutely. I do not know him personally, but I have interacted with him enough online to feel that I can trust him on this in a way I wouldn’t trust some random Kickstarter.

Well if people are in the position that you are in where they are familiar with the developer, then by all means they should contribute. If you know that Tesh is a cool guy who has the skills to pull this off then good.

My concern is that people will watch the video and then pledge. Very few of the people who pledge are doing the necessary research on the game/console/board game developers.

I understand that Tesh is different to the Camelot folk as the money he’s asking for is substantially less. It’s LESS of a risk for LESS people – if that makes sense.

My argument is probably flawed, but there’s something I don’t like about thousands of people spending money on something that they don’t know anything about. Yes, it’s their money and yes, they might be right in doing so. I just really think that people are too quick to empty their pockets on such things.

I was keeping an eye on kickstarter years ago as it rose to the heighth of the interwebs. But now it just feels alien to me. I see very little logic is how people are using it.